Researchers Reveal The World's Most Controversial Wikipedia Articles

Wikipedia is a hugely valuable resource, but the fact that it
allows anyone and everyone to make edits to articles sometimes
produces something uncomfortable — "edit wars," whereby the
website's 77,000 editors fight it out to ensure their own edits
come out on top.

Today
MIT Technology Review points towards a fascinating new study
from Oxford University's Taha Yasseri, Anselm Spoerri, Mark
Graham, and János Kertész, who have produced an in-depth study of
the article's most prone to "edit wars," the articles that are
almost undoubtedly Wikipedia's most controversial.

The researchers used data not from the amount of edits, which
could bring up fast-moving but uncontroversial topics, but the
amount of “mutual reverts” — whereby one author completely
removes another's edits by reverting to an older version of the
entry, and the other author does vice versa. Other calculations
were made to take into account the age of the article and weed
out fights that were limited to two overzealous editors.

Below is a list of the most controversial articles in ten
languages. The articles' titles either show their corresponding
title on the English language Wikipedia, or the direct
translation if there is no article on English language Wikipedia
(these articles are italicized).